but the large gulls were now very scarce, for,
as he said, the English robbed their nests far in the North, where they
breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in the gull-house, and
when small birds were killed by means of a frying-pan and fire at night.
His father once lost a valuable horse from this cause. A party from
Wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, one dark night, on
Billingsgate Island, twenty horses which were pastured there, and this
colt among them, being frightened by it, and endeavoring in the dark to
cross the passage which separated them from the neighboring beach, and
which was then fordable at low tide, were all swept out to sea and
drowned. I observed that many horses were still turned out to pasture
all summer on the islands and beaches in Wellfleet, Eastham, and
Orleans, as a kind of common. He also described the killing of what he
called "wild hens" here, after they had gone to roost in the woods, when
he was a boy. Perhaps they were "Prairie hens" (pinnated grouse).

He liked the beach pea, (_Lathyrus maritimus_,) cooked green, as well as
the cultivated. He had seen them growing very abundantly in
Newfoundland, where also the inhabitants ate them, but he had never been
able to obtain any ripe for seed. We read, under the head of Chatham,
that, "in 1555, during a time of great scarcity, the people about
Orford, in Sussex (England) were preserved from perishing by eating the
seeds of this plant, which grew there in great abundance on the
sea-coast. Cows, horses, sheep, and goats eat it." But the writer who
quoted this could not learn that they had ever been used in Barnstable
County.

He had been a voyager, then?

Oh, he had been about the world in his day. He once considered himself a
pilot for all our coast; but now, they had changed the names so, he
might be bothered.

He gave us to taste what he called the Summer Sweeting, a pleasant apple
which he raised, and frequently grafted from, but had never seen growing
elsewhere, except once,--three trees on Newfoundland, or at the Bay of
Chaleur, I forget which, as he was sailing by. He was sure that he could
tell the tree at a distance.

At length the fool, whom my companion called the wizard, came in,
muttering between his teeth, "Damn book-peddlers,--all the time talking
about books. Better do something. Damn 'em, I'll shoot 'em. Got a doctor
down here. Damn him, I'll get a gun and shoot him"; never once holding
up h